While changed and a bit different its still an awesome game in its own right!!
Graphics: Again, blown away! Crytek really knows its stuff and theres is no complains when it comes to the graphics department. Fire is crisp and it never ceases to amaze me whenever i see a building just collapse in front of me, with real time graphics. And yet the most amazing aspect is not how gorgeus they look, but how well they run, even in high resolutions and max specs the game will mostly run incredibly smooth, which is always welcome when you need to keep focus, without worrying if the framerate will drop.
Gameplay: This is where the changes are really felt. People have been complaining that suit features have been removed when they simply been reorganized, instead of a wheel to choose between modes which held different abilities, now simple keystrokes give you acess to all the abilities of all the modes without having to change between modes. And while, yes, it can feel a bit overpower, it still makes sense, its not like you are invulnarable, most functions deplete energy like in the first game and at some point you will be forced to take cover. Personally i prefer it like this, because it made no sense to have to choose modes to acess diferent abilities. Moving on you have the playing in itself, levels are now much smaller then in the original crysis, but they still offer a great range of strategies to how to aproach a situation, when you reach a plaza full of soldiers many times your suit will pop up to advise in which routes to take, and personally i think that is fun, if not a bit too much telling. Sometimes you can sneak around, using sewer tunels to move around, or you can just jump down and try your luck in a shootout, or, if you think your odds are against, take control of a machine gun and gain the advantage, or even sneak up to the local sniper, take him out, and use his sniper to take out the reamining soldiers, overall it still offers quite a bit of freedom. Another thing ive also been hearing a lot about is enemy AI, and i dont get it. Personally i have no complaints, even in cloak mode if you get too close they will get suspicious and investigate, and if you shoot them from a certain place and then circle around in cloak, youll notice that they are still moving on youre previous position, just as any real person would if they were figthing an average foe. My only grip, although a small one, is that when you start kiling soldiers loose and right in cloak mode, the soldiers watching just get scared, comunicating their buddys deaths trough the radio and doing nothing, paralyzed in fear i guess.
Story: Again AWESOME! It goes off to a slow start as you try to understand whats going on and whats the relation of this game with the first, but as you move on and slowly understand whats happening and whats your paper in all this you get that this really is related to the first one. You are a US Marine called Alcatraz who somehow came upon a nanosuit, and as the only surving member of your squad, you have been given the mission to help a scientist called Gould who is the only one with a clue of whats really going on. Unfortunetely, between you and him stand an entire invasion of aliens called CEPH, who seek to eradicate humanity, and a PMC called CELL, who is after, both your suit, and its previous owner, who killed an entire regiment of CELL soldiers while escaping, and therefore confuse you with him, making them very trigger happy.
In the end, Crysis 2 lives up to its predecessor, not by being the same, but for trying new things, and managing better than most recent shooters which try the same formula over and over again. Crysis 2 is great not because its like the first Crysis, but because it stepped away from its predecessor shadow and gained a name by itself, not just relying on the name of the series to sell more copies.